Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction; Beyond the Wand

 

It's no secret (to the 5 people who read this blog, anyway 😀) that I love Mickey Spillane. So did Max Allan Collins and James Traylor. This biography was lovely. You could tell they really cared about their subject.

Mickey was an only child who spent his early years in New Jersey before his parents moved to Brooklyn. H was precocious and obviously very smart. He started submitting stories to magazines at a young age and ended up getting a job in the early comics. He enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and ended up becoming a flight instructor. He stayed stateside the whole war and was disappointed he never saw any actual combat. 

He married, had kids, and built an unassuming house in New Jersey, where he started churning out stories. When "I, the Jury" was published it caused quite a scandal for being full of gory violence and sex. The general public ate it up, though, and he became one of the highest selling writers (never author, he eschewed the word) of all time. 

Mickey really was Mike Hammer in a lot of ways. He claimed he was writing an autobiography of his own life (which he started but never finished), and part of the problem was that he'd been writing it all along in his own books. 

He died at the age of 88 from cancer, just six weeks after he told Collins. He told his third wife to give anything she found to Max after he died, saying he'd know what to do with it. Notes, pieces of manuscripts, all of it went to Collins, who's been diligently working to put the meat on the bones of the stories Mickey started. I appreciate the fact that he says he won't continue Mike Hammer once he's done with Mickey's notes. 

I'm totally in the mood to reread "Vengeance is Mine!" now, but alas, I have a million library books to get through. 

It's wild to see how grown up the Harry Potter kids are now, including Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy. The youngest of four brothers, Tom got into acting at a young age. Having three older brothers kept him grounded (about fan mail, his brother Chris asked "who the bleep would write to him?" incredulously). He also got to lead a semi-normal life at times, going to a regular school in between movies, getting into normal teenage scrapes. He admits he mostly got the part because he is a bit like Draco in real life. 

It didn't really occur to me, but he didn't spend a ton of time with the three main characters, which makes sense when you think about it. As an adult, he can now appreciate the enormous amount of talent he was surrounded by with all the adults and how lucky he was to work with all of them. 

After Harry Potter, he hit a bit of a slump and ended up moving out to L.A. He's dealt with some mental health issues that he wanted to shine a light on in order to remove the stigma. Sounds like he's doing better now, back in London and working in the theater. It was an interesting read.